Reprioritising and a review of the cooperation between the government and the private sector is the best approach that can be used to cut the current 24 per cent education funding gap that it is facing  for the next few years, experts say.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), stipulates that quality education can only be achieved if adequate financial resources- meaning at least between four and six per cent of your GDP or between 15 and 20 per cent of the annual national budget- goes to the education sector.

According to Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace (IRDP)’s Senior Research Fellow, Fred Mugisha, the standard set by UNESCO continues to be a challenge for many as at least 33 per cent of the countries in the world fall below this funding level.

However, he applauded Rwanda adopting the quality education model in 2013 adding that most of its characteristics feature in the country’s vision 2050.

But what is quality education?

Mugisha explains that quality of education relates to the quality of students and how prepared they are to learn, the curriculum, and the teachers.

"How are the teachers prepared in terms of skills and the delivery of the lessons? We look at the learning environment including classrooms, textbooks etc and then the quality of the outcome meaning what level of knowledge and skills the learner has acquired at the end of their course,” he explained.

Students take part in a tech-enabled STEM teaching programme organised by the Ministry of Education at Fawe Girls School in Gasabo District in February 2020. Photo: Craish Bahizi.

All these require adequate and consistent funding.

Mugisha explains that between 2000 and 2008, the education sector was facing a small funding gap of 3.2 per cent. However, at the time, 24 per cent of the national budget was going to the education sector which was above the 15-20 per cent standard set by UNESCO.

In 2013 to 2018, there was a 13 per cent funding gap.

"That gap can be considered big but even then, 16.8 per cent of the budget was earmarked for the education sector and Rwanda was still within the international standards,” he reminded.

Although the education sector was allocated over Rwf421.7 billion making the biggest allocation in the 2021/2022 budget, there is still a 24 per cent funding gap for the 2018-2023 period if all the key areas of the education sector are to be funded.

"This means that it is 11 per cent of the national budget putting us below international standards,” he explained.

Mugisha suggested that with education partners running schools in the country fully on board, the government can focus on reducing the number of students who dropout or repeat classes since that cuts off the resources spent on them.

He also touched on the issue of priorities where he suggested that the government can concentrate on the areas like Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) while the private sector takes on the arts.

"Why does the government continue to fund social sciences instead of concentrating on STEM and TVET? Most private sector universities are already concentrating on offering human sciences. It is a matter of prioritising and distributing the resources,” he said.

Statistics indicate that since its establishment, University of Rwanda has graduated 49,477 of which 53 per cent were in non-STEM areas and 47 per cent in STEM-related fields.

The University of Rwanda was created in 2013 after merging seven public higher learning institutions.

Currently, the university is carrying out a comprehensive review of all the 158 academic programmes it offers with an aim to phase out those that do not reflect the realities of the current labour market.

Diversity could be hurting sector

University of Rwanda (UR)’s Professor Masengesho Kamuzinzi – an associate professor in educational planning, the country’s expanded and largely diversified system involving many stakeholders with different philosophies about education has been challenging in terms of evaluating quality education standards.

He pointed out that currently, there are three categories of systems that are clashing.

"There are new elitist schools, some of which are offering international programs. You have others offering national programs only but with a high level of competitiveness. Then there is another category that I like to call the old school elitist educators which are mainly boarding schools owned by the Catholic Church in partnership with the government,” he explained.

He explained that the three have different philosophies which fall under the promotion of knowledge based economy, leaving no child behind and the promotion of TVET which can be problematic sometimes.

He pointed out that the diversification of the curricula and the students attending these schools are on very different levels and have very different philosophies of their future.

"This diversification of the curriculums and the motivation of the students and teachers makes you wonder what standard we can use when we are assessing the quality of our education system because on one side you have highly competitive people and on another, demotivated one,” he said.

He explained that to assess quality, there is a need to see if the students have acquired basic skills and competencies that can be applied in real life.

He added that this would require going beyond the administrative inspection where content, the stream of work, the preparation of the lessons and how acquired skills are put into practice are checked.

Kamuzinzi said this is challenging since there are currently no clear cut standards but applauded the Ministry of education for the efforts it has been putting into rectifying this where it put a basic scorecard in place in 2015.

He said with the work being put into the upcoming policy, improvements will be registered.

"I have realised from talking to other heads of schools that they are not well informed about the standards. Probably with the scaling up, they will understand what can be applied, what can be owned by teachers and the parents should also know about these indicators,” he said.

As of 2019, the government was running 14.9 per cent of the schools in Rwanda, Parents associations run 25.1 per cent, the Catholic Church 24.7 per cent, Protestant Church 23.5 per cent, Adventist 1.7 per cent, Islamic 0.8 per cent, and individuals/NGOs run 9.3 per cent.